


Racist Fish

by RationalMerlin



Category: Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid (1989)
Genre: Finished!, Gen, Liberalism, Racism, Satire, Short Story, Social Justice, critical theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:08:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25226572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RationalMerlin/pseuds/RationalMerlin
Summary: Inspired by the events of July 3rd 2020
Kudos: 2





	Racist Fish

I am so sorry. I have knowingly unleashed a monster into your strange dry realm. I have inflicted a grave danger upon you poor unfortunate souls, vainly hoping beyond hope that I could save my own doomed kingdom from its final plunge into darkness. I wouldn't dream of asking for forgiveness - I have long since forfeited my right to that - but I would ask that you heed my warnings, so that perhaps your people need not suffer the same fate as mine already have.

I wish I could say I did everything I could have done to stop her. It would be far too easy for me to live out the remainder of my sorry life believing that. But it's simply not true. I knowingly cheered her on at first, convincing myself that she could do no wrong. I buried my growing doubts, afraid of what others might say or think. Yes, even I was  _ complicit _ . I did nothing for far too long; and when I finally managed to get over my cowardice and act, it was too late.

  
Anyway, it's over now. She has me utterly beaten. She's finally part of your world, and there's nothing more I can do to prevent it. My final hope is that someone in your faraway land above the ocean will be able to understand my dire warning, and that your kingdom can avoid the terrible fate that has befallen mine. 

I suppose I should start at the beginning. 

\---

Down here under the sea, I used to be one of the big fish. I was the King's half-sister, you see, and such a lofty position in society came with a certain amount of social status and privilege. The young princess's hatching day was a big event, and I remember it like it was yesterday. 

All of the Royal couple’s hopes and dreams were pinned on this one child, who, all being well, would one day grow up to rule the kingdom. Everyone knew that her chances were slim. The Royal couple had already spawned several hundred thousand offspring, but none of them had been able to pass the Imperial Aptitude Test that, by the ancient king Poseidon's constitutional law, would allow the potential heir to inherit the throne. The IAT was a complex exam that tested both intelligence and psychological fitness: it had succeeded for generations in selecting wise and kind rulers, those best suited to make intelligent decisions on behalf of the people while resisting the temptation of absolute power. As both King and Queen were getting older and were unlikely to be able to conceive again, this was realistically their last chance to produce an heir. It had been generations since the kingdom had gone without a suitable ruler from the Royal family, and records from that time had mostly been lost. It was evidently not a good time for record-keepers.

Against all odds, the King & Queen’s prayers were granted. From the minute the little princess burst forth from her egg into the open water, it was clear that she was a preternaturally gifted and intelligent child. She was speaking in full sentences after a week, reading after a month, and by the time she reached adolescence at the age of two, she had devoured almost every fiction book in the castle library. Not only that, but she was blessed with a kind, empathic spirit - she clearly cared deeply about her fellow fish. Her parents showered her with love and affection: they were so happy with their miracle child that they gave her everything she ever asked for (and plenty that she didn't, too). On her fifth birthday, she breezed through the IAT, and passed with flying colours. The kingdom's future finally seemed to be secure, and there was much rejoicing.

Having passed the biggest test of her life, the young princess went to study at the Great Berkeley Reef, as was traditional for the kingdom's would-be elites. Founded by the great feminist philosopher Judith Bullshark, it boasted among its activist scientists such luminaries as Robin DiAngelfish and Ibram X Kelpi, whose works had been widely cited by top bloggers as the most important of our time. The princess majored in feminist aquatic theory with critical comparative ichthyology, and, by all accounts, she loved every minute of it. She learned everything there was to know about speciesist power structures, food chains of oppression, and dorsal fin positivity. After ten short years of study, she graduated at the top of her class after submitting her dissertation in the subject of feminist glaciology. That girl had everything. The citizenry hailed it as a work of rare genius, though very few of them had actually read more than the  _ Watery Blog of Record _ ’s highlights. If only they had.

\---   
  
I put my tentacles up here, and admit to those unfamiliar with my watery culture: before King Poseidon’s liberal reforms, our sea was not a happy place. Life was a Darwinian struggle between predator and prey, where the strong flourished and the weak were crushed underfin. The sharks and cetaceans were top dogfish due to their sheer size and ferocity; the merfolk, pinnipeds, and cephalopods were next, clinging on to that position with their ingenuity and wits. In the middle were the prey species - the invertebrates, the sea birds, and most bony fish. Right at the bottom were the flounder, the remora and the cleaner wrasse - species forced to live off the scraps that sunk to the seafloor, or press-ganged into a life of servitude by the sharks and whales. Before Poseidon’s great enlightenment, life for those at the bottom was nasty, brutish, and short, and those at the top grew fat from the spoils of their unpaid labour. Three principles governed the great King’s reforms: freedom, openness, and universality. Slow but steady progress has been made ever since. I will admit, we could still do better on many metrics, but it is undeniable that we have come a long way since the bad old days.

  
\---   
  


The princess rode a wave of media hype. Whatever social cause or movement she was championing became the talk of the town. She successfully exposed the interspecies rape epidemic that had been going on between high profile California sea lions and penguin actresses for years without being reported on. She championed the rights of flounders and flatfish, who in the past had been heavily discriminated against as bottom feeders. She even managed to get a bill passed that guaranteed equal pay for cleaner wrasses and their shark CEOs. Progress was coming faster than ever before.

  
A few dissenters, mostly older sharks and whales, grumbled and wrung their fins about a lack of due process, base rate neglect, or a general failure to understand basic economics, but it was obvious to those in the know that they were just trying to protect their positions of unearned privilege, so why would anyone bother listening to them? A few of them even lost their jobs, but no one really cared much. After all, weren’t we due an overcorrection after years of oppression and hardship? Anyway, the sharks and the whales were doing just fine - ultimately, the princess only wanted them to acknowledge their privilege, and to try and be better, more thoughtful citizens. When she said things like ‘kill all sharks’, or ‘abolish whales’, the media was quick to inform us that she didn’t really  _ mean  _ those things. As anyone who went to the Reef would know, ‘kill all sharks’ didn’t actually mean that all sharks ought to be killed. It meant that the power structures that sharks had assembled for themselves in society such that they occupied a favoured position should be dismantled. It meant that  _ sharkness  _ was in transition, and it wasn’t moving fast enough. If I’m honest, I had my misgivings. But I was too afraid to swim against the current, and I too went along with it. What harm could come of a slightly over-zealous movement that broadly wanted to do good, anyway?   
  
\---   
  
Then came the Sebastian Crabbe affair. Perhaps the most obvious sign that we were swimming in uncharted waters. You see, Sebastian Crabbe was one of the kingdom’s most popular entertainers. He was an older crustacean, incredibly well-known and well-liked around the oceans. An old song he had recorded 31 years earlier called ‘Under the Sea’ in her opinion used outdated cultural stereotypes and racist imagery. She took particular issue with one line about the colour of seaweed, saying that it expressed a colourist preference for a particular shade of kelp, when all shades of kelp ought to be treated equally. Sebastian had been a champion of progressive causes throughout his long career, so it wasn’t a surprise when he wrote a lengthy op-ed for the  _ Watery Blog of Record _ defending his art. What was surprising was the response. The blog’s editors were forced to resign due to the backlash; Sebastian’s music was removed from stores and his concerts were cancelled; and one by one his friends lined up to denounce him. Were they trying to curry favour with the future ruler? Or did they truly believe what they were saying? It’s hard to say. But, when Sebastian quietly disappeared a few months later, no one noticed. He hasn’t been heard from since. Rumours are that he was last sighted near Singapore’s East Coast district flanked by two of the princess’s personal chefs, but these are very difficult to confirm.

After Sebastian’s fall from grace, many others followed. Entertainers, comedians, authors - none seemed safe, as their life’s work was denounced and then put down the memory hole. One brave flounder who insisted that he did not need to be treated as a victim was denounced as a species traitor and an Uncle Turbot. Things were moving along nicely in the present, but the princess hadn’t yet reckoned with the past.

It was well known that the merfolk had a complicated legacy - while they had never been as blatantly exploitative as the whales and the sharks, they had nevertheless benefitted immensely from systems of oppression. For whatever reason, they had always occupied a position of privilege in society, and merfolk remained stubbornly overrepresented in key positions in finance, the government, and the media, no matter what attempts were made to redress the balance. It was commonly known, but not particularly widely discussed, that King Poseidon had used unpaid cleaner wrasses himself and had discriminatory attitudes towards the flatfish. This hypocrisy haunted his legacy, and despite his many achievements he was widely reviled at the Reef and other such enlightened institutions. Traditionally, this had been viewed as harmless eccentricity by the mainstream, but when the princess took up the mantle publicly, the people flocked to follow her. The  _ Watery Blog of Record _ published op-ed after op-ed about Poseidon’s wicked ways, claiming that he had founded the kingdom specifically to preserve the institutional oppression of cleaner wrasse bodies.    
  
One day, the princess led a mob to the royal palace, where they forcibly removed the generations-old statue of Poseidon and flung it onto a beach in south-west England. A watershed moment had been reached. It wasn’t long before his teachings were being removed from school syllabuses, his name removed from street signs, his legacy being completely rewritten to match current Great Berkeley Reef dogma. 

The princess’s mother was very upset - King Poseidon was her distant ancestor, and she believed his legacy to be, on balance, a good one. She made the fatal mistake of criticising her daughter about this publicly - a few hours later, the princess’s guards burst into her chamber, forcibly dragged her to Cleaner Wrasse Plaza (as the former site of Poseidon’s statue had been renamed), took out a fish hook, and filleted her on the spot. Although the princess denied any involvement in this act of regicide, she pleaded with the courts for clemency for her errant guards, which was duly granted. Riots followed, but her guards quickly dispatched the riot leaders in a ‘mostly peaceful’ massacre. Her good works were complete.

\---

You might be wondering how I felt about these developments. Well, by this point, I was convinced that the princess and her retinue were entirely out of control. Although I still believed that they meant well, their methods were now unarguably beyond the pale. Our progress towards a fairer society seemed to be veering wildly off course. I had always thought of myself as a liberal and a progressive - but this progress seemed to me to be in entirely the wrong direction. I knew that something had to be done.

\---   
  
When my half brother, the king, came to me the night of the massacre, beside himself with grief, I finally resolved to act. In a way, he had lost both his wife and daughter that night. The two of us hatched a plan together in the hope that, without the princess’s leadership, the kingdom could return to a more sober state. It was a long shot, as we knew we couldn’t move against her openly. We knew that the only way to get rid of her would be to convince her to go away of her own accord.

The King loved his daughter still, and knew her perhaps more deeply than anyone else. The one thing she had always wanted, without even knowing it herself, was a victimhood of her own. As a merperson, and more pertinently as the heir apparent to the kingdom, she had no real claim on oppression in this society. Although she could champion the cause of the less fortunate, in her heart she wanted more. As a child, she had been fascinated by the world above the ocean, where the humans lived - the gadgets and gizmos that dropped from the surface had always amazed her. If she could somehow make it there, she would be in a very tiny minority - underrepresented in every possible way. It would be her paradise. The King felt sure that, with the right persuasion, she wouldn’t be able to resist the pull of this alien culture. He was right. When he told her of how deeply unjust your society was, and how he utterly forbade her from ever attempting to go there, it was like a red rag to a bull shark. She slowly but surely worked out that I had developed the technology that would enable me to transform her tail fin into human legs through a well-bribed whisper network of eels. It seemed her father and I had manipulated her perfectly. When she arrived at my laboratory, alone in the dead of night, I was thrilled to welcome her in. Perhaps further disaster could yet be averted. I gave her the legs that she asked for. And, in a stroke of brilliant folly, I took away her voice.   
  
\---   
  
I led the transformed princess to a quiet beach at the edge of the Baltic Sea. There I left her, unconscious, in the hands of the fates. I scuttled back to my laboratory, from where I could watch events unfold at a safe distance through the innocent-looking step counter I had implanted in her newfound feet.   
  
It was clear that the princess would struggle with mobility for some time. Although I had given her fully functional legs, her muscles were not very well developed, and by the time I had returned to my lab, she had collapsed from exhaustion. A Danish fisherman and his wife discovered her, unconscious, on the beach, and nursed her back to health. Although she was unable to speak, she was helpful and courteous around the house, and it wasn’t long before she had become a common sight around the town, helping out those in need as best she was able. It wasn’t long before she attracted the attention of a local official, who decided that the story of the beautiful girl who had washed up on the beach was too good a PR exercise to ignore. He invited the Crown Prince of Denmark to his little town for a simple meet and greet. The prince was intrigued by the story and made a special trip. He was immediately captivated by the princess’s innocence and beauty. He had to find out more. It wasn’t long before he brought her back to Copenhagen to present her to the royal court.    
  
\---   
  
With the princess gone, the King and I had hoped that the movement that she started would fade away. How wrong we were. The princess’s disappearance almost immediately led to further riots. Conspiracy theory took over - the  _ Watery Blog of Record _ published an op-ed arguing that the princess had most likely been taken hostage by ‘powerful vested interests’ - of course referring to exactly the sort of rich whales and sharks who lapped up their content. Mobs of merfolk looters started to raid shops and small businesses, using this line of thinking as justification. When the King’s Royal Guard tried to intervene, the looters simply called for their abolition. Amazingly, many parts of the kingdom did away with their branches of the Royal Guard altogether, which of course led to more looting. Civil order had completely broken down.   
  
Throughout all of this chaos, the King had been trying his best to hold back the tide, and to reverse the flood of public opinion. He was largely ineffectual. Eventually, sensing the chance to make a quick buck, a faithless eel from the whisper network leaked the King’s involvement with the princess’s disappearance to the press. It wasn’t long until he received the same treatment as his late wife, his head impaled on a trident outside the Royal palace as a cautionary tale. Somehow my name was kept out of the headlines, but it doesn’t matter: the  _ Watery Blog of Record _ published a proscription list in their opinion page, and my name was there. My crime? Not actively condemning my half-brother’s supposed racism and sexism. I managed to flee, but I know it is only a matter of time until I am caught.   
\---   
  
Back on dry land, the princess had become a mainstay of court life. Although still mute, she had made quite an impact on the Royal household. Even without a voice, she managed to organise the kitchen staff and cleaners into an effective trade union and thus enabled them to negotiate a higher salary; she exposed a notoriously predatory Lord for the monster that he was; she even managed to persuade the Lords to increase the aid budget that was traditionally spent on the city’s neediest inhabitants. Once again, everything that she did attracted glowing praise - after all, who could argue? These things were unambiguously good. Without the warning signs that we had in the ocean through her commentary, how could anyone know any better? The young prince soon fell head over heels in love with her. He put his father’s best scientists to work on finding a cure for her strange muteness, so that he could at last hear exactly what she had to say.   
  
\---   
  
And that just about brings us to the events of today. I’ve been hiding out in an obscure mangrove swamp for some months now, aided by some brave soles whose identities I would never commit to paper. But I can see the writing on the wall. As soon as I am discovered here, I’m as good as calamari.    
  
Although I haven’t left my bunker for months, I have heard reports from the outside ocean from a couple of trusted confidants. There is a surface level of absolute conformity - nobody wants to be the first to stop clapping, the first to rouse the anger of the mob. Whales and sharks everywhere are volunteering for implicit bias and unconscious speciesism training, admitting their guilt and complicity in a desperate and vain effort to avoid the ire of the mob. King Poseidon’s liberal ideals have been overturned in a single generation of chaos and death: and those who once called themselves liberals are the ones most strongly cheerleading their demise. “The people” have decided to re-create the segregated spaces by species that were once viewed by liberals as anathema, and cross-species mating is once again strongly discouraged. As a merfolk/cephalopod hybrid myself, I find this last point utterly repulsive. Species-fluid people like me have only been widely accepted for a couple of generations, and this particular step backwards feels like a personal affront.   
  
I recently found out that the princess had managed to regain her voice. What technology can remove, technology can reinstate, after all. And the first words out of her mouth? 'Tear it down. Tear it all down'. The other day, I heard a report of a statue falling from the Danish shore into the Baltic Sea. It wasn’t long before statues were sinking all around the Atlantic. History has always had a nasty habit of repeating itself.

  
\---

Alas! In my hubris, I forgot one of King Poseidon’s key lessons on freedom of expression. When I silenced the little mermaid, I inadvertently sowed the seeds for your downfall. I wanted to stop her spreading her toxic ideas, but in trying to prevent this from happening I gave her exactly the platform she needed. Only through her initial enforced silence was she able to ingratiate herself into your society - if any of you had heard what she had intended, in full, from the outset, you would have never given her the time of day. My arrogant efforts to protect you might have sown the seeds of your downfall.   
  
I write this message in the hope that your strange dry world can successfully turn a corner and avoid the fate that has befallen mine. But I don’t hold out much hope. Today, I heard the news that the Prince of Denmark committed suicide, drowning himself in the sea on the very beach where he found the princess. He may have lacked the courage of his convictions, but I beg you, dear reader, do not follow his example. You can stop her and her poisonous ideology now, before she does to your society what she has done to mine. Reject her circular reasoning, disarm her Kafka-traps, resist her attempts to remake your language to fit her overly simplistic notions about the world’s inequities. Although she could never see it herself, she is nothing more than a racist fish. Allow your society to submit to her at your peril.   
  
  
  
Yours in eternal solidarity,   
  
  
  
  
The Little Bear


End file.
